


Mr. November

by RedHorse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Auror Sirius Black, Harry is 19, M/M, Pre-Slash, Prompt Fill, Shame, Sirius Black Lives, The Potters Live, ambiguous ending, inappropriate feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22389529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedHorse/pseuds/RedHorse
Summary: The Auror Department has a fundraising calendar. Sirius has been Mr. November since the mid-90s.Harry has every issue.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Harry Potter
Comments: 40
Kudos: 336
Collections: Lightningstar Holiday Fest





	Mr. November

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OnlyDeadOnTheOutside](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnlyDeadOnTheOutside/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [OnlyDeadOnTheOutside](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnlyDeadOnTheOutside/pseuds/OnlyDeadOnTheOutside) in the [LightningstarHolidayFest](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/LightningstarHolidayFest) collection. 



> A/N
> 
> Thanks for such a fun prompt! I hope the story is something like what you were looking for. <3
> 
> This fic is part of an ongoing fest, and there's still time to fill prompts! Un-betaed.
> 
> **Prompt:**
> 
> Due to cuts in Ministry Funding the Auror department must find new ways to finance the force. After much consideration the idea of a sexy Auror calender was born with Sirius Black happily taking the lead. The first year was so ridiculously popular they kept doing it.
> 
> Then comes Christmas 1994 (also known as the year of Harry's sexual awakening) where the twins as a gag gift present a blushing Harry the calendar. Harry's favorite month quickly became November where Auror Black often ended up in the most erotic photographs. 
> 
> Harry of course just wanted to support the Aurors and so every year after that he always made sure to buy every version they released, making sure to keep the previous ones safely under his mattress. 
> 
> Cue 2001 and Harry's had a break in; leaving his whole home ransacked and Harry injured. Who else should take his statement other than Auror Black, who had to do a rather thorougher investigation of the crime scene.

Harry almost slept through the whole thing.

In hindsight he wished he had.

Because if he’d stayed asleep, then in the middle of the break-in he wouldn’t have raced down the stairs, slipped on the broken glass on the floor, cut his bare feet basically to ribbons then charged through the house with his wand drawn, anyway, determined to catch the culprits.

If he’d stayed asleep, he wouldn’t have trailed blood all through the house, tripping every emergency blood ward that his overbearing parents had installed when he’d moved into his own place two years before.

If he’d stayed asleep, the Aurors wouldn’t have been alerted. The response time was seven minutes.

Limping, Harry made his way to the door, exasperated with himself. He wasn’t very good at the cleaning spells that took blood out of fabric, and he was almost out of dittany. But he wanted to wave off the Aurors and get himself healed before the inevitable, panicked Floo call from his mother.

The Auror usually on call for Harry’s neighborhood—Roger, nice guy—wasn’t on the other side of the door though. The face that peered up at Harry concernedly from between pieces of hair that had escaped his messy half-bun was much more familiar than that.

“Sirius,” Harry said. His voice sounded normal, but inside his chest his heart did a funny little backflip, as it had been doing every time Harry saw his godfather for the past seven years or so. He’d gotten better at ignoring it, though.

“Harry,” Sirius answered, his eyes narrow on Harry’s face, traveling slowly down his neck, his chest, carefully assessing for injury. Harry’s heart did the flopping thing again, leaving him a bit breathless. Otherwise he would have said something to forestall Sirius’ inevitable panic when his once-over reached Harry’s bloody feet.

“What the—” Sirius shoved away from the doorframe, one arm encircling Harry’s waist and drawing him protectively close, while with the other he drew his wand and pointed it into the open space of the small foyer. He held Harry so tightly that Harry’s feet were lifted off the floor and he was spun around like this was all a dancestep, trying not to hyperventilate at the way Sirius’ body felt, tight against his. Harry’s hand had fisted in Sirius’ shirt automatically for balance, and under his knuckles he felt heat and the faint thrum of Sirius’ heart.

“They’re gone, whoever they were,” Harry thought to say. “And I’m fine. Just—just stepped on some glass.” He was torn between wanting Sirius to put him down immediately and wanting to spend the rest of his life attached to Sirius’ side, so he felt equal parts relief and disappointment when Sirius tucked his wand into his holster and turned toward Harry, letting him bear his own weight in the process.

The renewed pressure on the lascerations made Harry wince and groan. Just like that, Sirius had picked him up again, but this time he swept Harry all the way off his feet and held him in his arms. It was humiliating, to be carried like a child or a—a  _ damsel _ —but Sirius’ forearm felt like warm iron under his knees, and the soft, often-washed cotton of his shirt smelled like firewood and engine oil. 

“Where’s your dittany?” Sirius murmured against Harry’s temple.

“Downstairs bath,” Harry answered, feeling a little faint, and not from blood loss.

Sirius carried him into the hallway like he weighed nothing, though he commented with a quick, grim smile, “You’ve grown. What do you weigh now? Three, four hundred pounds?”

Harry breathed out a laugh. “Something like that.”

Sirius made a show of staggering the last few steps, then carefully eased Harry down to sit on the side of the tub without putting pressure on his feet. Sirius frowned at the trail of blood droplets they’d left.

“I can’t believe Mom hasn’t been through the Floo yet,” Harry said, panting a little. The pain was intense, now that he had no adrenaline from the possibility of lingering intruders or Sirius’ embrace to distract him.

“She won’t be,” Sirius said. “I calmed the wards for now. They’ll think what I thought, when I first got the call—that you tripped them accidentally. Again.”

“It’s not my fault they’re so multilayered I don’t even know what half of them do,” Harry grumbled. The first time he’d tripped the wards, he’d burned some toast. There was hardly any smoke. The second time, a bird had flown through an open window. The third time, all he’d done was broken a dish.

Sirius found the bottle of dittany in the cabinet, frowned at the level of the contents, then tapped the bottom of the glass container with his wand. There was a faint sound, like a puff of air, then the bottle was full again.

“I should have known there was an everlast Charm on that bottle,” Harry said, thinking of his mother with fond exasperation. “If it were up to her, I’d never leave the house.” He stopped talking as Sirius knelt in front of him and gently picked up his right foot, holding him gently by the ankle.

“Did you see anything?”

Harry shook his head mutely, then realized that Sirius was uncorking the bottle of fresh dittany and wouldn’t be able to see the gesture. “No,” he said, watching Sirius spread three leaves, soft and flexible, over the bottom of his foot and held it in place with his palm. The relief was instantaneous. A faint green fog curled around Sirius’ fingers.

Sirius looked up at Harry’s sigh. “Better?”

Harry nodded, hoping that shock and blood loss would excuse his flushed cheeks. Sirius studied him for a moment as though he doubted his answer, then he repeated the process on his other foot.

“What about anything you may have heard? Voices, spells?”

“No.”

Sirius used a hand towel to wipe the blood from Harry’s feet, then cleaned the towel. Seeing Harry’s curious look, he smiled and squeezed his calf before getting back to his feet. “Application of magic can counteract the dittany. Sit there and I’ll have a look around.”

Harry nodded glumly. His feet still stung. The essence of the leaves would have traveled into his body through the open wounds and obviously still had some repairing to do. 

“Didn’t you move almost two years ago?” Sirius called after a moment, sounding amused. “How are you still not unpacked?”

He must have found his way into the downstairs study, where Harry had put all of his boxes after he got tired of walking around them two months into his move. Sixteen months later, there they remained. He could almost imagine the room through Sirius’ eyes; it made him grimace. “Consolidate your clutter,” Hermione had suggested, the day she’d helped them stack everything there. He’d been glad for her help, though he’d snatched a couple of the smaller, “special” boxes with contents he was paranoid about her seeing, including— 

Oh, fuck.

Harry forgot about his still-sensitive feet and shot down the hallway and into the study. As he ran he thought, surely, there was no way that Sirius would hone in on the  _ one _ humiliating, incriminating, terrible box— 

But as Harry arrived in the doorway, he saw that Sirius had. He was holding the lid in one hand and looking down into the box’s contents like he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

Then he looked at Harry and narrowed his eyes, dropping the lid back onto the box. “You shouldn’t be on your feet yet.”

“I—” Harry began, his gaze locked on the box in horror, his voice strangled.

Sirius followed the angle of his eyes and chuckled. It was almost teasing, but there was an edge of—discomfort. Tension. Harry covered his eyes with his hands.

“It’s . . . they’re Ron’s,” he offered lamely.

Sirius had gotten close enough again that Harry could smell him. He dropped his hands and stared at Sirius’ unreadable face. Sirius put a gentle hand on his shoulder to turn him around.

“You should sit down,” he said gruffly, and steered Harry carefully around the debris in the hall to the living room, where Harry dropped down on the squashy couch and put his head back in his hands.

Sirius sat beside him and put a light hand on the center of Harry’s back. Harry realized that before today, he could hardly remember Sirius ever touching him. He was always warm and friendly with an easy grin. Growing up, he was sure Sirius had touched him. Even though he was busy with the Aurors and always sent off on dangerous and long-term missions, memories of him still dotted Harry’s childhood, though it was nothing like now, when he seemed to be around consistently. Apparently he’d slowed down the pace of his world-saving activities.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sirius said, his voice as deceptively light as his touch. “You were probably after Mr. June, anyway.”

Except the entire stack of calendars were folded over to stay opened to Sirius, always Sirius, Mr. November. He couldn’t even picture the blur of other faces he’d flipped past to find Sirius when a new issue came out. It was his most secret shame. When he’d moved out he’d boxed the calendars with a vague plan to Banish them and start fresh. All he’d managed to do was keep them in their box instead of stuffing them under his mattress again—but he guiltily visited them, anyway, when the . . .  _ need _ . . . arose.

“I said they were Ron’s,” Harry reminded Sirius, daring a glance through a gap in his fingers. Not that he’d really expected Sirius to buy that pathetic excuse. 

“If they were, I can’t believe he’d part with them,” Sirius said reasonably, but though his voice stayed steady and even, his eyes were like quicksilver, laser-bright, on Harry’s. Searching for something. Well, Harry had never been very good at lying, so he assumed Sirius had already found whatever he was looking for in Harry’s expression.

“It’s for a good cause,” Harry muttered, imagining the box’s contents—all too easily; he’d last spread the calendars out for a good look two days before—all dog-eared, and in the case of 1997, badly creased. Harry had been holding that edition when he latched onto a particular fantasy (. . .  _ Sirius crawling over the motorcycle seat he was leaned over and which only just concealed what lay beyond the shadowed skin below his navel, reaching out and grabbing Harry by the collar to drag him close. . .) _ and gone so weak in the knees he’d dropped the calendar then planted a foot on the middle of it as he staggered, lost to the need to get his hand in his jeans.

Sirius’ hand made a circle on his back. Harry dropped his hands and with every ounce of bravery he had, met Sirius’ steady, penetrating stare.

Sirius knew. Harry had never thought he’d know. Never wanted him to. Even if he rarely wanked to the thought of anyone else. Even if he’d yet to have a boyfriend for whom he hadn’t closed his eyes and pretended was Sirius, at least once. Harry wasn’t an idiot. He knew his crush was stupid and unhealthy and irresponsible, but it was okay, because no one would know.  _ You can’t be punished for thoughts _ , he remembered someone telling him once.  _ Thank Merlin _ .

But Harry did feel like he was being punished—or rewarded, it wasn’t clear; he’d never felt like this before, never been  _ looked at  _ like this before—until Sirius’ hand fell away from his back and finally, cruelly, mercifully, Sirius broke eye contact. 

Relief and disappointment resumed their battle in Harry’s now-weary heart.

“It was probably a routine break-in. But when your dad’s the Minister, there’s no such thing as a routine anything, so I’ll just finish up and make a report. You stay here,” he added firmly, with a sidelong glance at Harry that deliberately avoided his eye.

Harry, too ashamed to say anything, nodded and curled up on his side. The Floo was in front of the sofa, and he almost wished his mother would thrust her head through, just to distract him. 

She didn’t. The house stayed quiet except for the sounds of Sirius traipsing around, and the occasional whoosh or clatter as he used magic to clean up a mess or repair a broken object. There was a tinkling like delicate wind chimes when he finally repaired the window that had been the cause of Harry’s bleeding feet.

If he hadn’t woken up, Harry realized, he wouldn’t be here now, his oldest and darkest secret revealed in all its dirty glory to the one person Harry had most needed to keep it from.

Miserable, he turned over so he faced the sofa back. That way when Sirius came back in and stood over him, Harry didn’t have to look at him. He just picked at the weak place in the upholstery and answered Sirius’ parting questions monosyllabically.

“Do your feet hurt?”

“No.”

“Do you need anything else?”

“. . . no.”

“Should I Floo your parents, or will you?”

“Me.”

“About the . . . about the box . . . ?”

“Just—” Harry’s voice was strangled, and he couldn’t bring himself to say anything else. Sirius’ hand landed briefly on his head, a warm and gentle pressure.

“Okay,” he said softly, parting the thick waves with his thumb. His fingertip felt electric and cool on Harry’s warm scalp. “Okay.”

*

That should have been that. But it wasn’t.

*

Late January, Harry got a familiar package in the mail, delivered by a stern-looking Ministry owl. He thought it was something from his dad, until he held the wrapped parcel in his hands and knew in an instant by its particular dimensions and weight what it had to be.

_ But I didn’t order it _ , a desperate voice in the back of his mind insisted. He’d been far too humiliated, knowing that Sirius knew, imagining that somehow he’d know that the anonymous form with the scrambled address he always submitted was  _ actually _ Harry . . .

Still, he found himself tearing open the paper to reveal the glossy outer-cover, his shaking hands barely getting purchase on the edge of the first few pages as he flipped to the back, then turned over Ms. December—a tall, pretty blond with impressive biceps, which flexed then relaxed in the photo’s short loop—to arrive on Sirius’ page.

It was taken from behind, in low lighting. The square-on image of Sirius’ muscular back, bracketed by darkness, made a lump grow in Harry’s . . . throat. His gaze traveled helplessly down the groove of Sirius’ spine to the bottom of the page, where the curve of the twin curves of the tops of Sirius’ arse cheeks were just tantalizingly visible.

Harry watched, riveted, as the cords of muscle in Sirius’ back shifted. Sirius was slowly turning, and lifting his bent head, so that Harry could just see the corner of his eye and the edge of his smirking mouth, a day’s growth of stubble, and the hard edge of his hip— 

The loop began again. Harry stared, trying very hard not to drool. It was several minutes before he saw the bright scrap of parchment that had fallen from between the pages while he’d hastened to get the calendar out of its wrapping paper.

He knelt slowly and picked it up. He couldn’t say he’d seen Sirius’ handwriting before, and nonetheless he knew in an instant that’s who had written the note.

_ About that box. _


End file.
